Just Living Is A Joy In Hubbell's Country

Sue Hubbell lives in a small cabin on a peninsula between two rivers in the Ozark Mountains. She earns her living and a great deal of pleasure by keeping bees.

The pay is far from good, the work hard and the results uncertain from year to year. But what this middle-aged, divorced woman has lost in security, she has gained in experience.

In A Country Year, the author gives us a collection of autobiographical essays that demonstrate in a quiet, apt manner the joys of an out-of-way life. The daughter of a botanist, Hubbell brings the eye of a home-grown naturalist to her 100-or-so-acre farm. She tells us about the indigo buntings around her cabin, how tree frogs mysteriously cling one night to her living room windows and how, returning home late one evening, she finds herself surrounded by unexpected almond-shaped eyes. She turns off her headlights and gets out of her pickup to discover that she is in the middle of a herd of deer. Ignoring her, the deer continue browsing on the clover and orchard grass that grow around her barn.

There is a sense of leisure about these essays, an easy grace that comes perhaps from the author's taking time to look, to consider, to speculate.

''I am an early riser,'' Hubbell writes, ''and now that the weather is warm I like to take a cup of coffee out under the oak trees in back of the cabin and get a feel for the kind of day it is going to be.''

Just as she slips into the day, the author seems to slip into her subjects, more with a whisper than a shout. The subdued quality of her style is largely successful. Whether she is discussing the habits of a large black rat snake in her chicken coop, the South Central Missouri Beekeepers' annual pig roast or the devastating suicide of a Vietnam veteran at a campground near her cabin, Hubbell's voice maintains a comfortable pitch. It is the voice of an observer who has practiced waiting and watching.

But Hubbell is also a doer, and her expositions on beekeeping show her to be an active, strong woman who has mastered tools and techniques that would be a mystery to most of us.

In one of the best essays of the collection, she describes how she must desensitize her nephew to the venom of bee stings. He is a young man who has hired on to help her harvest the honey, and he holds up well as his aunt purposefully places stinging bees on his hand, increasing the number each day as his tolerance builds. He finally works up to 10 stings a day with no allergic reaction.

In a delightfully unacademic way, the author explains a lot about the zoology of bees -- how they make honey, how the presence of drones late in the summer indicates that a colony has queen problems, how the bees seem to communicate. But she is quick to point out that despite many years of intimate contact with these creatures, she remains profoundly puzzled by much of their behavior.

Living the Questions is the subtitle to her book, and she shows in nearly every essay how she is confronted daily with more questions than answers about both man's world and the natural world. Far from unsettling her, the unanswered questions affirm for Hubbell the joy and constant surprise of life.